New York City, Nypd | featured news

An New York City police officer is accused of threatening to kidnap, cook and eat women in a bizarre plot where he fantasized about how "tasty" one victim looked and said it would be easy to roast a person in his oven, officials said Thursday.

In more than six years of spying on Muslim neighborhoods, eavesdropping on conversations and cataloguing mosques, the New York Police Department's secret Demographics Unit never generated a lead or triggered a terrorism investigation, the department acknowledged in court testimony unsealed late Monday. The Demographics Unit is at the heart of a police spying program, built with help from the CIA, which assembled databases on where Muslims lived, shopped, worked and prayed. Police infiltrated Muslim student groups, put informants in mosques, monitored sermons and catalogued every Muslim in New York who adopted new, Americanized surnames.

A 17-year veteran of the New York Police Department was suspended and four other men were arrested after a ransom phone call was traced to the detective’s home in Queens.

Nearly half of recently retired officers in a survey said they had “personal knowledge” of crime-report manipulation, but the Police Department questioned the study’s methodology.

A quick-handed NYPD sergeant stopped a violent felon from shooting him in the gut by jamming his ring finger under the hammer of the felon’s .38 revolver, cops said today. Sgt. Michael Miller and Officer William Reddin were on patrol when they noticed a livery cab speeding eastbound on Quincy Street near Malcolm X Boulevard at about 4 a.m. today. The plainclothes cops pulled the beige Lincoln Towncar over, but when they walked up displaying their shields they noticed that one of the passengers in the back seat, Eugene Graves, was making suspicious movements near his waistband.